Marriott Boycotted Over Porn

The locally based AIDS Healthcare and Pink Cross foundations have organized a boycott of Marriott hotels over porn. The protest is not about the Mormon-founded chain's in-room, X-rated offerings. No, that's just fine. The problem, according to the groups, is the hotel company's palette of on-demand smut that features actors who do not use condoms.

"Marriott is certainly not alone among major hotel chains that promote and profit off the sale of unsafe, condom-less adult films to their hotel guests," AIDS Healthcare Foundation president Michael Weinstein states. "However, we want to highlight the brazen hypocrisy--the Mormon Marriott's moral masquerade--of such a so-called family-oriented hotel chain profiteering off adult films that endanger the lives of the performers acting in them."

Marriott

The groups organized a "porn-in" last night at the Marriott on Figueroa Street downtown to launch the boycott. As we speak, the organizations contend, some businessman in a dark Marriott room somewhere across America is watching Just Explicit Sex, Naughty Office Workers, Mothers Do It Better, or Daddy's Girl Takes it All -- titles they say are offered by the chain, titles that feature condom-free sex.

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The groups have been emboldened by two HIV outbreaks in the industry in 2004 and last summer. The former outbreak was likely facilitated by condom-free sex during film shoots in Brazil. The isolated incidences have inspired state and county health officials to threaten to force the industry require condom use in the name of health and safety, but so far they've shot blanks.

The San Fernando Valley-based industry, however, has made pains to virtually require regular HIV tests among its actors, and boosters claim that its HIV rates are much lower than those of the general public.

Former porn actress Shelley Lubben says that's not good enough. She founded the Pink Cross Foundation to help "victims" of the industry -- the talent -- "recover." Pink Cross claims that, while HIV might be under control in the industry, chlamydia and gonorrhea rates among performers are ten times those of 20- to 24-year-old in Los Angeles County.

"I fully support the campaign to require condoms in all porn production, and believe putting public pressure on middlemen such as the Marriott--latter day purveyors of porn who are profiting richly off the depiction of unsafe sexual activity--can only help the health and safety of performers who are forced to work in unsafe and hazardous work conditions every day," Lubben states.

Dennis Romero is an L.A. Weekly staff writer. He formerly worked at the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Los Angeles Times, where he participated in Pulitzer Prize-winning coverage of the L.A. riots. His work has appeared in Rolling Stone online, the Guardian and, as a young stringer, the New York Times.